Life is hard in the honky-tonk. If the booze or the peckerwoods don't get you, there's still The Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City.

He and Big Mama Thornton were taking a break backstage when it happened. The dance floor was covered with Mexican and black people, a big haze of cigarette and reefer smoke floating over their heads in the spotlights. White people
were up in the balcony, mostly low-rider badasses wearing pegged drapes and needle-nose stomps and girls who could do the dirty bop and manage to look bored while they put your flopper on autopilot. Then we heard it, one shot, pow, like a
small firecracker. Johnny's dressing-room door was partly opened and I swear I saw blood fly across the wall, just before people started running in all directions.

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Everyone said he had been showing off with a .22, spinning the cylinder, snapping the hammer on what should have been an empty chamber. But R&B and rock 'n' roll could be a dirty business back then, get my drift? Most of the musicians, white
and black, were right out of the cotton field or the Assembly of God church. The promoters and the record-company executives were not. Guess whose names always ended up on the song credits, regardless of who wrote the song?

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But no matter how you cut it, on Christmas night, 1954, Johnny Ace joined the Hallelujah Chorus and Eddy Ray Holland and I lost our chance to be the rockabillies who integrated R&B.

Johnny had promised to let our band back him
when he sang "Pledging My Love."

In those days, Houston wasn't exactly on the cutting edge of the civil-rights movement. We might have gotten lynched, but it would have been worth it. Listen to "Pledging My Love" sometime and tell me you wouldn't chuck your box in the suburbs and push your boss off a roof to be seventeen and hanging out at the drive-in again.

Nineteen fifty-four was the same year we met the kid from
Mississippi Eddy Ray used to call the Greaser because that boogie haircut of his looked like it had been hosed down with 3-in-One oil. But teenage girls went apeshit when the Greaser came onstage at the Louisiana Hayride, throwing their panties at him, crushing the roof of his Caddy to get into his hotel room, tearing out each other's hair over one of his socks.

"I think the guy is a spastic. It's not an act," Eddy Ray said.

"The Greaser played on Beale Street with Furry Lewis and Ike
Turner. Give the guy some credit."

The beer-joint circuit was full of guys like us, most of them talented and not in it for the money, either. On average, the total pay wasn't more than fifty bucks a gig. We lived on Vienna sausage, saltine crackers, and Royal Crown colas, and brushed our teeth and took our baths in gas-station lavatories.

Eddy Ray was the big difference with our group. He played
boogie-woogie and blues piano and a Martin acoustic guitar
and could make oil-field workers wipe their eyes when he sang

"The Wild Side of Life."

Girls dug him, too. Eddy Ray still heard bugles blowing in the
hills south of the Yalu River, where he got grabbed and spent
over two years at a prisoner-of-war camp in a place called No
Name Valley. He always said four hundred of our soldiers got
moved up into Red China, where they were used in medical experiments.

I was at the Chosin Reservoir, too, and I could tell when he was thinking about it because the skin around his left eye would twitch like a bumblebee was fixing to light on it. So why would a stand-up guy like Eddy Ray be bothered by a kid from Tupelo, Mississippi? Remember when I mentioned the gals who could start your flopper flipping around in your slacks like it has a brain of its own? This one's nickname was the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City. She had gold hair, cherry lipstick, and blue eyes that could look straight up into yours like you were the only guy on the planet.

When Eddy Ray and I first saw her, she was singing at a roadhouse called Buster's in Vinton, Louisiana. The heat had started to go out of the day, and through the screens we could see a lake and, beyond it, a red sun shining through a grove of live oaks. We were at the bar, drinking long-neck Jax, eating crab burgers, the big-bladed window fan blowing cool in our faces.

Eddy Ray's attention was fixed on the girl at the microphone
and the way her purple cowboy shirt puffed and dented and
changed colors in the breeze from the floor fan, the way she
closed her eyes when she opened her mouth to sing, like she
was offering up a prayer.

"What a voice," he said. "I'm going to ask her over."

"I think I've seen her before, Eddy Ray," I said.

"Where?"

"At the Piggly Wiggly in Beaumont," I said. I looked at his expression, the sincerity in it, and wanted to kick myself.

She didn't drink beer, she said. She drank gin fizzes. And it all
went on her tab, which told me she had a special relationship
with the owner. When Eddy Ray went to the can, she smiled
sweetly and asked, "You got some reason for staring at me, R. B.?

I know you from somewhere?"

I replied, my face as blank as a shingle, "No, ma'am, I don't
think so."

"If you got a haircut and tucked in your shirt and pulled up
your britches, you'd be right handsome. But don't stare at people.

It's impolite."

"I won't, I promise," I said, and wondered what we were fixing
to get into.

One week after Johnny Ace capped himself (or had somebody do it for him), we were blowing down the road in Eddy Ray's '49 Hudson, headed toward our next gig, a town up in Arkansas so small, it was located between two Burma-Shave signs. Kitty Lamar lay down in the backseat, airing her bare feet, with the toenails painted red, out the window. She was popping bubble gum and reading a book on, get this, French existentialism,
and commenting on it while she turned the pages. Then,
out of nowhere, she lowered her book, looked at me, and said,

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"I wish you'd stop giving me them strange looks, R. B."

"Excuse me," I said.

"What's with you two?" Eddy Ray said, one hand on the wheel,
a deck of Lucky Strikes wrapped in the sleeve of his T-shirt.

I didn't say diddly-squat to Eddy Ray. But, man, was it eating
my lunch. The previous night at the motel, I'd heard her talking
on the phone to the Greaser. It was obvious to me Kitty Lamar
and the Greaser had known each other for some time, and I'm
talking about in the biblical sense. Eddy Ray had evidently decided to let bygones be bygones, but in my opinion she kept doing things that were highly suspicious. For example again, she loved fried oysters and catfish po'boy sandwiches, but when we'd be playing a gig around Memphis, she wouldn't touch a fish or shrimp or oyster dinner with a dung fork. Why is this significant?

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The Greaser was notorious for not allowing his punch of the day to eat anything that smelled of fish. Is that sick or what?
"Why don't we stop at that seafood joint up the road yonder
and tank down a few deep-fried catfish sandwiches?" I said. "I
know Kitty Lamar would dearly appreciate one."

She gave me a look that would scald the paint off a
battleship.

"It doesn't matter to me one way or another, because I don't
eat seafood this far inland," she said, her nose pointed in her
book.

"Why is that, Kitty Lamar?" I asked, turning around in the
seat.

"Because that's how you get ptomaine poisoning. Most people
who went past the eighth grade know that. Have you ever applied for a public-library card, R. B.? When we get back to Houston, I'll show you how to fill out the form."

"Am I the only sane person in this car?" Eddy Ray said.

You know the secret to being a rockabilly or countrymusic
celebrity? It's not just the sequins on your clothes and
the needle-nose, mirror-shined boots. Your music has to be full
of sorrow, I mean just like the blood-flecked broken body of Jesus on the cross. When people go to the Assembly of God church and look up at that cross, the pain they see there isn't in Jesus' body; it's in their own lives. I'm talking about droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, black-lung disease, or pulling cotton bolls or breaking corn till the tips of their fingers bleed. I went to school with kids who wore clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks. Eddy Ray was one of them. What I'm trying to say is, we come from a class of people who think of misery as a given. They just want somebody who's had a degree of success to treat them with respect.

We'd all been in the dumps since Johnny died, me more than anybody, although I couldn't tell you exactly why. In fact, I
felt sick thinking about it. I'd look over at the Gin Fizz Kitty from Texas City and hear that peckerwood accent, which sounded like somebody pulling a strand of baling wire through a tiny hole in a tin can, and I'd flat want to lie down on the highway and let a hog truck run over my head. A group of Yankees by the name of Bill Haley and His Comets were calling themselves the founders of rock 'n' roll, and we were playing towns where families in need of excitement drove out on the highway to look at the new Coca-Cola billboard. And Johnny was dead, and maybe not by his own hand, and his friends had gotten a whole lot of gone between him and them.

But that night we didn't take a break for two hours. When
Eddy Ray ripped out Albert Ammons's "Swanee River Boogie"
on the piano, the place went zonk. Then we kicked it up into
E-major overdrive with Hank's "Lovesick Blues" and Red Foley's
"Tennessee Saturday Night," Eddy Ray and Kitty Lamar sharing
the vocals. I got to admit it, the voices of those two could
have started a new religion.

The snow stopped and a big brown moon came up over the
hills, just as guess who walked in? You got it. The Greaser himself, along with Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee, all three of them decked out in sport coats, two-tone shoes, and slacks with knife-edged creases, their open-neck print shirts crisp and right out of the box. They sat at a front-row table and ordered long-neck beers and french-fried potatoes cooked in chicken fat. In less than two minutes, half the women in the place were jiggling and turning around in their chairs like they'd just been fed horse laxative.

"What's he doing here?" Eddy Ray said.

Duh, I thought. But all I said was, "He's probably just tagging
along with Jerry Lee and Carl. Sure is a nice night, isn't it?"
Then Kitty Lamar came back from the ladies' can, her eyes
full of pure-blue innocence, as though she had no idea the
Greaser was going to be there, and said, "Look, all the fellows
from Sun Records are here. Are you gonna introduce them,
Eddy Ray?"

Eddy Ray looked through the side window at the hills
sparkling with snow, the sky black and bursting with stars.

"I haven't given real thought to it," he said. "Maybe you
should introduce them, Kitty Lamar. Maybe you could sing
a duet. Or maybe even do a three- or a foursome."

"How'd you like to get your face slapped?" she replied,
chewing her gum, rolling her eyes.

Eddy Ray pulled the mic loose from the stand, kicking a lot of dirty electronic feedback into the speaker system, like fingernails raking down a blackboard. His cheeks were flushed with color that had the irregular shape of fire, his eyes dark in a way I had not seen them before. He asked Carl and Jerry Lee and the Greaser to stand up, then he paused, as though he couldn't find the proper words to say.

The whole joint went quiet as a church house. I could feel sweat breaking on my forehead, because I knew the memories from the war that lived in Eddy Ray's dreams, and I'd always believed part of him died in that camp south of the Yalu. Eddy Ray carried a stone bruise in his heart, and if he felt he had been betrayed by the people he loved, he was capable of doing bad things, maybe not to others, but certainly to Eddy Ray. It wasn't coincidence that he and Johnny Ace had been pals.

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The floor lights on the stage were wrapped with amber-
and-yellow cellophane, but they seemed to burn red circles into my eyes. Jerry Lee and Carl were starting to look uncomfortable, and the crowd was, too, like something
really embarrassing was about to happen.

"Say something!" Kitty Lamar whispered. But Eddy Ray just kept staring at the Greaser, like he was seeing his past or himself or maybe our whole generation before we went to war.

"These guys are not only great musicians," Eddy Ray began,
"they're three of the best guys I ever knew. It's an honor to have them here tonight. It's an honor to be their friend. They make me proud to be an American."

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I thought the yelling and table pounding from the crowd was
going to blow the glass out of the windows. In my lifetime I guess I've known every kind of person there is...brig rats, pimps, drug pushers, disc jockeys on the take, promoters
who split for Vegas with the cashbox, and, my favorite bunch, scrubbed-down ministers who preach Jesus on Sunday and Wednesday night and the rest of the week screw teenage
girls in their congregations. But none of them can hold a candle to a friend who stabs you in the back. That kind of person not only steals your faith in your fellow human beings, he makes you resent yourself.

We had taken a break about 11:30 p.m., figuring to do one more set before we called it a night, and I hadn't seen the Greaser in the last hour or so. I glanced out the back window at a gazebo that was perched up on a little hill above a picnic area. I couldn't believe what I saw.

Silhouetted against the moon, the Greaser and Kitty Lamar
were both standing inside the gazebo, the Greaser bending down toward her so their foreheads were almost touching, her ta-tas standing up inside her cowboy shirt like the upturned noses on a pair of puppy dogs. I felt sick inside. No, that doesn't describe it. I wanted to tear the Greaser apart and personally drive Kitty Lamar down to the bus depot and throw her on the first westbound to Big D and all points south.

But that would have been easy compared to what I knew I
had to do. I waited until he and I were alone, at breakfast the
next day, in a restaurant with big windows that looked out on
the Mississippi River. Eddy Ray was fanging down a plate of
fried eggs, ham, grits, and toast and jam, hammering ketchup
all over it, his face rested and happy.

"I got to tell you something," I said.

"It's not necessary. Eat up."

"You don't even know what I'm gonna say."

"You're worried about the Greaser. I had a talk with him last
night. Kitty Lamar and him are just friends."

"Yeah?" I said.

"You got a hearing problem?"

I stared out the window at a tug pushing a long barge piled with shale. The barge had gotten loose and was scraping against the pilings of the bridge. The port side had tipped upward against a piling and gray mounds of shale were sliding through the starboard deck rail, sinking as rapidly as concrete in the current.

"I saw her about five years back in a Port Arthur cathouse,"
I said.

Eddy Ray studied the barge out on the river, chewing his food,
his hair freshly barbered, razor-edged on the neck. "What were
you doing there?"

"I got a few character defects myself," I said. "Least I don't
go around claiming to be something I'm not."

"Kitty Lamar already told me about it. So quit fretting your
mind and your bowels over other people's business. I swear,
R. B., I think you own stock in an aspirin company."

"I've heard her talking to him on the phone, Eddy Ray. They're
taking you over the hurdles."

This time he couldn't slip the punch, and I saw the light go out
of his eyes. He cut a small piece of ham and put it in his mouth.

"I guess that puts a different twist on it," he said.

I hated myself for what I had just done.

Could it get worse? When we got back to the motel, the
desk clerk told Eddy Ray to call the long-distance operator.

"Nobody answered the phone in my room?" Eddy Ray said.

"No, sir," the clerk said.

Kitty Lamar was supposed to have met us in the diner but
hadn't shown up. Evidently she hadn't hung around the room,
either. Eddy Ray got the callback operator on the line and she
connected him with our agent in Houston, a guy who for biblical example had probably modeled his life on Pontius Pilate's.

As of that morning all our dates were canceled.

"What gives, Leon?" Eddy Ray said into the receiver. He stood
by the bed, puffing on a Lucky Strike while he listened, his back
curved like a question mark. "Investigation? Into what? Listen
to me, Leon, we didn't see anything, we don't know anything,
we didn't do anything. I've got a total of thirty-seven dollars and forty cents to get us back to Houston. The air is showing through my tires. Are you listen"

The line went dead. Eddy Ray removed the receiver from his
ear, stared at it, and replaced it in the telephone cradle. "Do you have to be bald-headed to get a Fuller Brush route?" he said.

"Leon sold us out for another band?" I said.

"He says some Houston cops want to question us about
Johnny's death."

"Why us?"
"They wonder if we saw a certain guy in Johnny's dressing
room." Then Eddy Ray mentioned the name of Cool Daddy
Hopkins.

I felt my mouth go dry, my stomach constrict, the kind of
feeling I used to get when I'd hear the first sounds of smallarms
fire, like strings of Chinese firecrackers popping. "We'll go to California. You know what they say: Nobody dies in Santa
Barbara.' How far is Needles from Santa Barbara?"

But it wasn't funny. We'd had it and we both knew it.
Back then, disc jockeys took payola and people who got to
the top were either humps for the Mafia or signed deals that
left them with chump change. A black guy in Jennings, Louisiana, put out an R&B record that sold a million copies and netted him twenty-five dollars. Even the Greaser paid his manager 51 percent of his earnings.

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When you got in trouble with the wrong people, you took up bottleneck guitar on a street corner or punched out your eyes and joined the Five Blind Boys. In our case, the wrong people was Cool Daddy Hopkins, a six-foot-six mulatto who wore three-piece suits, a yellow fedora, and popped matches on his thumbnail to light his Picayune cigarettes.

He not only carried a nickel-plated, pearl-handled derringer,
he shot and killed a white man in Mississippi with it and wasn't lynched or even prosecuted.

Northerners always thought the South was segregated. Wrong.
Money was money, sex was sex, music was music, and color didn't have squat to do with any of it. Some people said Johnny Ace might have gotten in Cool Daddy's face one too many times. I didn't know if that was true or not. But when we got back from our gig in Arkansas, the Houston cops questioned us about Johnny and his relationship with Cool Daddy. Our names ended up on the front page of two Houston newspapers. In the world of R&B and rockabilly music, we had become the certifiable stink on shit.

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Kitty Lamar and Eddy Ray had called it quits, even though you
could tell neither one wanted to let go of the other. I wanted to blame the Greaser for busting them up, but I couldn't forget the fact it was me who told Eddy Ray that Kitty Lamar was probably bumping uglies behind his back.

That's what I did for the guy who had carried me three hundred
yards across a corrugated rice paddy while bullets from
Chinese burp guns popped snow around his bootlaces.
We played at a carnival up in Conroe and at a dance
in Bandera and didn't clear enough to cover gas and hamburgers and the tire we blew out on a cattle guard. The boys in the band started to drift off one by one and join other groups. I couldn't blame them. We'd been jinxed six ways from breakfast ever since Johnny had died. Finally, Eddy Ray and I admitted defeat ourselves and got jobs as roughnecks on a drilling rig off Galveston Island.

One night, he wrote a song he called "The Oil Driller's Lament."
We recorded it on a 45 rpm that cost us four dollars in a recording booth on the old Galveston amusement pier, with Eddy Ray singing and me backing him up on harmonica and Dobro. This is how it went:

Ten days on, five days off,

I guess my blood is crude oil now.

Don't give your heart to a gin-fizz kitty

From the backstreets of Texas City,

'Cause you won't ever lose

Them mean ole roughnecking blues.

It was a song about faded love and betrayal and honky-tonk
angels and rolling down lost highways that led to jail, despair,
and death. Some of the lyrics in it even scared me. It was sunset when we made the recording, and the sky was green, the breakers sliding through the pilings under the pier, the air smelling of salt and fried shrimp and raindrops that made rings in the swells.

A lot of country singers fake the sadness in their songs, but when Eddy Ray sang this one, it was real and it broke my heart.

"What you studying on?" he asked.

"I messed you up with Kitty Lamar," I said.

He spun our four-dollar recording on his index finger, his
face handsome and composed in the wind off the Gulf. "Kitty
Lamar loved another guy. It ain't her fault. That's the way love
is. It picks you, you don't pick it," he said.

The sun was the dull red color of heated iron when it first comes out of the forge. I could feel the pier creak with the incoming tide and smell the salty bitterness of dried fish blood in the boards.

I watched the sun setting on the horizon and the thunderheads
gathering in the south, and I felt like the era we lived in and had always taken for granted was ending, but I couldn't explain why.

"Hey, you and me whipped the Chinese army, R. B. They just
haven't figured that out yet," he said. "There's worse things than being an oil-drilling man. I'm extremely copacetic on this."

I mentioned to you that we were jinxed six ways from
breakfast? The next morning, with no blowout preventer on the
wellhead, our drill bit punched into a pay sand at a depth where
nobody expected to find oil. The pipe geysered out of the hole under thousands of pounds of pressure, clanging like a freight train through the superstructure. Then a spark jumped off a steel surface, and a torrent of flaming gas and oil ballooned through the derrick and melted the whole rig as though the spars were made of licorice.

Eddy Ray and I sat on the deck of a rescue boat, hair singed,
clothes peppered with burn holes, and watched the fire boil
under the water.

"Does Cool Daddy Hopkins still have his office in the Fifth
Ward?" he said. Houston's black district was its own universe. There were bars and barbecue joints and shoeshine stands on almost every street corner. You could hear music from radios, jukeboxes, church houses, old black guys jamming under an oak tree.

Dig this: In the black district there were no record stores. Both
78 and 45 rpm records were always sold at beauty and barbershops.

The owners hung loudspeakers outside their businesses
to advertise whatever new records had just come in, so all day
long the street was filled with the sounds of Gatemouth Brown,
LaVern Baker, and the Platters.

Cool Daddy Hopkins had his office in the back of a barbershop,
where he sat in front of a big fan, a chili dog covered with
melted cheese and a bottle of Mexican beer on his desk. Cool
Daddy had gold skin with moles on it that looked like drops of
mud that had been splashed on him from a passing car. His coat and vest hung on the back of a chair, along with a .32 derringer stuffed in a shoulder holster. His silk shirt was the color of tin, pools of sweat looped under his pits.

He kept eating, sipping from his beer, his eyes never blinking
while he listened to what Eddy Ray had to say. "So you think I'm the guy keeping you off the circuit?" he said.

"I'm not here to make accusations. I'm just laying it out for
you, Cool Daddy. Johnny was my friend, but I don't know what
happened in that dressing room," Eddy Ray said. "We told the
cops that. Now we're telling you. We're eighty-sixed and shit-canned all over the South."

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Cool Daddy reached into a cooler by his foot and slipped a beer
out of ice that had been pounded and crushed in a cloth bag with a rolling pin. He made a ring with his thumb and index finger and wiped the ice off the bottle onto the floor. There were a couple of glasses turned top down on a shelf above his head. I thought he was going to offer us a beer to split. Instead, he cracked off the cap with a bottle opener and drank from the neck.

"Johnny and me was both in the United States Navy, ammunition loaders, can you dig that?" he said. "You know who was loading right next to me? Harry Belafonte. That's no jive, man."

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But Eddy Ray wasn't listening. "Our agent says he doesn't
want trouble with you. So if you're not the problem, why is
Leon telling us that?" Eddy Ray said.

The sunlight through the window seemed to grow warmer, more harsh in spite of the fan, the air suddenly close and full of
dust particles and the smell of hair tonic from the shop up front.

" 'Cause Leon is like most crackers. If he ain't got a colored man to blame for his grief, he got to look in the mirror and put it on his own sorry-ass self."

Eddy Ray leaned forward and stuck an unlit Lucky Strike in
his mouth, fishing in his jeans for a match. His hair was uncut,
wet, and combed straight back, curly on the back of his neck.

"Give us another R&B gig."

"The train went through the station and you ain't caught it,
man," Cool Daddy said. "Wish it'd been different, but it ain't."
Eddy Ray found a book of matches but lost his concentration
and put them away. He took the Lucky Strike out of his mouth
and brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist. "I'll put it another way. If you cain't see your way to hep us, just stay the hell out of our sandbox," he said.

"You still don't get it, do you?" Cool Daddy replied, a smile
tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"Get what?"

"I ain't the power in this game. Who you think screwed you on the circuit, boy? Who got that kind of power?"

Eddy Ray's eyes blinked, but not in time to hide the glow of recognition in them.

"Yeah, that's right," Cool Daddy said.

"The word is your lady friend been badmouthing you with certain people at Sun Record Company. The word is they don't like you, motherfucker, particularly a certain boy from Mis'sippi don't like you."

Cool Daddy pinched his temples like he was struggling not to
hurt the feelings of dumb white people such as ourselves. "Let
me strap it on you, boy. I thought maybe she was leaking info
about me to the cops, so I had a detective get ahold of her phone records." Then he mentioned the name of a powerful man he said Kitty Lamar had phoned repeatedly at Sun Records. "I don't know what you done to her, but she fixed yo' ass good."

The only sound in the room was the vibration of the electric
fan. Eddy Ray's eyes looked like brown pools that someone had
filled with black silt.

"He was lying," I said when we were outside.

"You're the one who told me Kitty Lamar was a Judas. You
cain't have it both ways, R. B."

"I'm going out west," I said.

We were in traffic, headed toward Eddy Ray's house in the Heights section of north Houston, oak trees sweeping by us
on wide boulevards where termite-eaten nineteenth-century
houses with wide galleries sat gray and hot looking in the shade.

I couldn't believe what I'd just said and the implication it had
for my friendship with Eddy Ray. He finally lit the cigarette he'd
been fiddling with since Cool Daddy's office.

"Am I invited?" he asked.

"Nobody can help you, Eddy Ray. You don't think you should
have survived the war, and I think you're aiming to take both
of us down."

"Sorry to hear you say that." He flipped the dead paper match
into the traffic.

I got out of the Hudson at the red light and went into the first
bar I could find. Lone Star and Jax beer might seem like poor
solace for busted careers and lost friendships, but I figured if I
drank enough of it, it would have to count for something. And
that's exactly what I did, full tilt, for the next six months.

I picked watermelons in the Rio Grande Valley and rode a freight train west and cut lettuce in El Centro. I played
Dobro for tips in bars on East Fifth Street in Los Angeles, followed the wheat harvest all the way to Saskatoon, and ended up on Larimer Street in Denver, where I met Cisco Houston and played as a guest on his syndicated radio show right before he got blacklisted.

I saw the country from the bottom side up. I may have married
a three-hundred-pound Indian woman on the Southern
Ute Reservation, but I can't be sure, because by the time I
sobered up from all the peyote buttons I'd eaten, I was in an uncoupled boxcar full of terrified illegal farmworkers, roaring at
eighty miles an hour down Raton Pass into New Mexico. And
that's what led me to one of those moments in life when you
finally figure out there are no answers to the big mysteries, like
why the innocent suffer, why there's disease and war and all
that kind of stuff. I also figured out that what we call our destiny is usually decided by two or three casual decisions, which on the surface usually seem about as important as spitting your gum through a sewer grate.

I crawled off the boxcar at the bottom of the grade in Raton
when the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire
countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, wood smoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow.

I could smell the way the country probably was when it was
only a dream in the mind of God.

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I found a bar by the railway tracks but didn't go in. Instead, I
walked down to a café built out of stucco, networked with heat
cracks, where a bunch of Mexican gandy dancers were eating
breakfast. I had one dollar and seven cents in my pocket, enough to order scrambled eggs, a pork-sausage patty, fried spuds, and coffee, and to leave a dime tip.

While I sipped coffee, I thumbed through a three-day-old
copy of an Albuquerque newspaper. On an inside page was a
story about none other than the Greaser. I had read enough
stories about the Greaser's career to last me a lifetime, but in
the third paragraph was a statement that was like a thumbtack
in the eye. According to the reporter, the Greaser had left Sun
Records at least a year ago and had signed a managerial deal
with a guy who used to be a carnival barker.

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"You okay, hon?" the waitress said to me. She was a big redheaded woman, with upper arms like cured hams and perfume you could probably smell all the way to Flagstaff.

"Me? I'm fine. Except for the fact that I'm probably the dumbest sonofabitch who ever walked into your café," I said.

"No, that was my ex-husband. There's some showers for truck
drivers in back. It's on the house," she said. She winked at me.

"Hang around, cowboy."

Life on the underside of America could have its moments.

Five days later, I climbed down from the cab of a tractor trailer
and walked four blocks through a run-down, tree-shaded neighborhood to Eddy Ray's house. He had scraped up a pile of black leaves and moldy pecan husks in his side yard and was burning them in an oil drum, his eyes watering in the smoke.

I dropped my duffel bag on the gallery and sat down in the
glider and waited for him to say hello.

"It's me, in case you haven't noticed the man sitting about ten
feet to your rear," I said.

"I got your postcard from the Big Horn County Jail," he said,
fanning smoke out of his face.

I didn't remember writing a card from jail, but that wasn't unusual then. "Remember when I told you Cool Daddy Hopkins was lying about Kitty Lamar?" I asked.

" 'Cause I had a grudge against her from the first time we heard her sing," I said, answering my own question. " 'Cause I didn't want her coming between us."

I let my eyes slip off his face. He picked up a huge sheaf of compacted leaves and dropped them into the flames. Thick curds of yellow smoke curled into the tree limbs overhead. "So what's changed?"

"When Cool Daddy told us Kitty Lamar had been bad-mouthing
us at Sun Records, the Greaser had already been gone from
Sun. Kitty Lamar didn't know anybody at Sun. The only person
she knew there was the Greaser. Besides, why would people
at the record company want to hurt us? Sun doesn't do business like that."

"You're sure about this?"

"I read it in the newspaper. Then I called the reference lady
at the public library to check it out. The Greaser has been managed by this carnival barker or freak-show manager or whatever he is for the last year."

Eddy Ray sat down on the steps, his back to me. His face and
arms were bladed with the sunlight shining through the trees.
He rubbed the back of his neck, like a terrible memory was eating its way through his skull.

"What's wrong?" I said.

"The Greaser called up and asked me to send him a demo. He
said he'd take it to a studio for us. He said he'd always thought
my voice was as good as Johnny Ace's."

"What'd you do?" I said.

"Told him he was a hypocrite and a liar and to lose my phone
number."

At least I wasn't the only one in the band with a serious thinking disorder.

"Seen Kitty Lamar?" I said.

"I heard she was singing in a lounge in Victoria."

I pushed the glider back and forth, the chains creaking, the
worn-out heels of my cowboy boots dragging on the boards.

"I'm not gonna do it," he said, looking straight ahead at the
yard.

"Do what?"

"What you're thinking. She can ring or come by if she wants
to, but I ain't running after her. Will you stop playing on that
glider? You're giving me a migraine."

"You got that 45 rpm we recorded on the amusement pier in
Galveston?"

"What about it?"

"I paid half of the four dollars it cost to make it. I want to take
my half to Victoria and let Kitty Lamar hear it. Then I'm going
to send my half to the Greaser."

I said that to piss him off good, which sometimes was the
only way you got Eddy Ray outside of his own head. He went
inside the house and came back out with the 45. It was wrapped in soft tissue and taped around the edges, and I knew that Eddy Ray hadn't given up his music.

"Does Kitty Lamar still paint her toenails?" I asked.

"Why?"

" 'Cause I always thought they were real cute."

He stared at me as though he'd never seen me before.

And that's how our band came back together, and that's how

"The Oil Driller's Lament" went on the charts and stayed there
for sixteen weeks. But Eddy Ray Holland and the Gin Fizz Kitty
from Texas City were never an item again. That's because she
married R. B. Benoit, Dobro-player extraordinaire, also known
as myself, in a little Assembly of God church in Del Rio, Texas.
The church was right across the river from the Mexican radio
station where, on a clear night, the Carter Family and Wolfman
Jack beamed their radio shows high above the wheat fields and
the mountains, all the way to the Canadian line, like a rainbow
that has nowhere else to go.